Rackauckas meets his match at trial (2/4/09)

Tony Rackauckastook the stand on Tuesday. How is it that Don Haidl, a 10th-grade dropout, has a greater ability to articulate his thinking on the witness stand than does a law-school graduate with 16 years as a trial lawyer, eight years as a judge and 10 years as D.A.?

T-Rack’s personality was best described perhaps, by Moxley, who said it “swings wildly between wooden and stiff,” a description the D.A. used to poke fun at himself at one of his inauguration parties. One-on-one, T-Rack is friendly and funny, and he has a big, engaging smile. But in front of groups, in tense situations, like on the witness stand fighting for his professional credibility, he can freeze up, hesitate, offer a sentence fragment, backtrack, hesitate, offer another sentence fragment, and maybe finally say he can’t be sure or doesn’t know â¦ or perhaps just let his answer tail off, unfinished.

This defeats my best attempts to take accurate notes of his answers because I find myself always crossing out something and trying to change direction with him, only to have to change direction and again and cross out more notes, while meanwhile, perhaps - perhaps - he’s uttered something I’d want to use but â¦ damn, now I’ve missed it.

That T-Rack wasbeing questioned by Joe Smith’s attorney, Jerry Steering, was not helping. Steering is an accomplished civil rights lawyer. But he is disorganized. While examining a witness, he’s constantly looking under stacks of paperwork and rummaging through files, trying to find a document or a Post-it, or something. His counsel table recalls an unmade bed, and he will restart questions as frequently as T-Rack restarts answers.

In fact, Steering’s brief departures from the lectern to look for something give T-Rack ample time to go meandering off on his answers. Codependents, they are. Watching the two of them trying to engage in the fine art of witness examination is like watching two drunks trying to put a coin in a parking meter.

Nowthat you get the tenor of the scene, you probably want to know how T-Rack did vis-Ã vis his self-defense. Did he blunder? Did he skewer his accuser?

Too soon to tell. He’s only been on the stand about three hours and still has a day to go. See Rachanee’s front-page story for the meat of his testimony about the badges, but remember: The judge is going to tell the jury that it doesn’t much matter whether T-Rack or anyone else was selling badges. What matters is whether Smith had reason to think T-Rack might be and whether T-Rack retaliated against him for going to the attorney general.

Rackauckas, I thought, did a pretty convincing job showing that if you disrupt the D.A.s’ Office through your politics, or if he has good cause to think you will, he will send you packing, no apologies. After he beat Wally Wade in 1998, he asked for his resignation. Other top people who supported Wade were asked to leave or left of their own accord.

So, in a way, some of the stuff being used against T-Rack from the 1998 election actually bolsters the notion that the way he handled Smith after the 2002 race was consistent and proper. He moved Smith out because he was creating a morale problem with his political activity, not because he talked to the A.G.

And his hesitations and recasting of answers evokes an executive who is not combative, or even very defensive. Nor does it come across as arrogant or imperious. He just seems to take time with his answers and doesn’t have a perfect memory. And in that sense, the T-Rack “style” may work. If he was as slick as Haidl on the stand, would he be believable?

Steering’s style, too, is probably more effective than my description implies. He spent 90 minutes on the first years of the Rackauckas era, before Smith really became an issue. He went over a highly critical grand jury report about those early years in excruciating detail, leaving highlighted sections condemning T-Rack on the overhead projector for what seemed like minutes at a time while floundering around for that elusive document.

The judge and opposing counsel both noted the extraordinary amount of time he was spending on an area of secondary relevance. Steering apologized in his shambling way, said he’d move things along, get back on track, refocus, etc., etc. Columbo in a pinstriped suit, I say.

Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com.

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